Turning it all upside down . . . Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive

What could and should be the relationship between research archives of endangered cultural heritage materials and the originating community? This paper argues that recent developments in distributed computing in a networked environment have allowed us to re-imagine this relationship in a way that profoundly changes the role of the archive and reinforces the desirability of establishing ongoing reciprocal relationships with cultural heritage communities. Some possibilities are suggested drawing from experience with PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures, established in 2003 as a collaborative venture between the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University) and with local community-based digital archives in the remote Australian communities of Belyuen and Wadeye. Repatriation and rights, planning principles for establishment and sustainability of local digital archives in community cultural centres, and models for a staged approach in setting up ongoing relationships with rights holders are discussed. The paper argues that digital archives, as distributed virtual institutions, need to engage with a number of different communities of interest: not only the individuals, communities, and institutions that own the cultural heritage objects we preserve, but also the wider academic community and international standards-setting bodies. Planning for our archives’ digital future means imagining ourselves as actors and creators within that virtual society.Australian Research Counci

Networking digital data on endangered languages of the Asia Pacific region

Since the invention of audio-visual recording technologies in the late nineteenth century, scholars of languages, cultures and musics from around the world have enthusiastically embraced the potential of portable recording technologies — initially audio, and since the 1970s, video — to capture the events that they study. Because of the changing nature of people, societies and technologies, many ethnographic recordings have outlasted the people, traditions and even languages that they recorded. These research recordings now have immense significance not only for researchers but also for the descendants of the people recorded and the cultural heritage communities whose traditions and languages they encode, yet they are more endangered than ever because of the current crisis of format obsolescence for many of the most common audio- and video-recording formats used in the 20th century. This paper discusses issues for finding and preserving these important cultural documents, many of which are held in private collections, or small research collections in Universities or local cultural museums. Many small archives do not have the funding or expertise to digitise and preserve their analogue audiovisual collections. There is some scope for optimism, however, because significant opportunities for collaboration across institutional and even national boundaries have been opened up by emerging high-bandwidth networking and distributed storage technologies. These enable distributed facilities for storage and management of archived research data. Digital technologies can also facilitate including the relevant cultural community collaborations to look after and manage significant audiovisual recordings. The paper discusses these issues through a case study of PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) (http://www.paradisec.org.au), an Australian project established in 2003 by the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne and the Australian National University to preserve and make accessible Australian researchers’ field recordings in the Asia-Pacific region.Australian Research Council Malaysian Centre for Pribumi Studies, Universiti Malay

Unlocking the archives

The popular expression ‘locked in the archive’ suggests that items are impossible to find and access once they are archived. Benefiting from new technologies, digital language and music archives nowadays provide an increasing number of records online in and about the world’s small languages. Just six of these archives list between them over 31,000 items, representing something like 2,300 languages. We can certainly do better at making records more widely available—especially records from small, marginalised and sometimes isolated communities—but how do we build pathways for re-use? We discuss the practice of the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) through the rubric provided by the FAIR principles. Building resources for learning and teaching language, history and culture, revitalising local performance traditions or reinforcing social identity through broadcasting are all possible pathways for future re-use of archival material. Ultimately, it is up to community members to decide on what they will do with archival materials once they have access; and it is up to language archives to listen and do our best to keep the pathways open to enable that.Endangered Archives Programme grant 693 (Preservation of Solomon Islands analogue recordings), Australian Research Council LIEF program (2003, 2004, 2006, 2011), ELDP LMG0009 Vanuatu Cultural Centre tape digitisation, ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, ARC Future Fellowship FT140100214, Australian Research Council DP1096897, LP140100806, LP160100743

Cybraries in paradise: new technologies and ethnographic repositories.

Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age.Australian Research Counci

Cybraries in paradise: new technologies and ethnographic repositories.

Digital technologies are altering research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers in active engagement with cultural heritage communities documenting music and language in the Asia- Pacific region, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers. We believe it is a matter of social justice as well as scientific interest that ethnographic recordings held in higher education institutions should be preserved and made accessible to future generations. We argue that, with appropriate planning and care by researchers, digitization of research recordings in audiovisual media can facilitate access by remote communities to records of their cultural heritage held in higher education institutions to a far greater extent than was possible in the analog age.Australian Research Counci

From intangible cultural heritage to collectable artefact: the theory and practice of enacting ethical responsibilities in ethnomusicological research

In this paper we focus upon two central and broad issues regarding the ethics of creating tangible, static artefacts from intangible and dynamic musical heritage: the process of making sound recordings, and the repatriation of those recordings to the cultural custodians, including the ways that these recordings act as a form of self‐representation... Our paper takes a reflective and pragmatic approach regarding these issues by focussing upon how they were addressed during Caterine Ingram’s recent twenty months of doctoral research into the music of the Kam people, a minority group resident in southwest China.Australian National University and Leiden Universit

Thanks for not throwing that away: How archival data (unexpectedly) inform the linguistic and ethnographic record

Witnessing the explosion in the amount of digital data over the past decade many authors have concluded that not everything can be preserved, that we must instead develop strategies for prioritizing objects for digital preservation (Ooghe and Moreels 2009). Digital language archives have been at least partly immune to these arguments, owing both to the nature of the data they preserve and to their status as early adopters. From the outset language archives have worked closely with the documentary linguistics community to develop standards for data portability which greatly simplify preservation and access (Bird and Simons 2003). The products of modern language documentation are by design much easier to archive than, say, eBooks or video games. Moreover, digital language archives have generally had privileged access to large computing infrastructures, often through particular arrangements with cyber-infrastructure built for hard science data storage and analyses. As digital archiving comes of age and digital language archives are brought within the fold of larger digital preservation efforts, the pressure to prioritize preservation goals will increase. Before we decide to discard materials as superfluous, it is useful to consider some of the ways language archives are being used. In this paper I review some current uses of materials housed at the Alaska Native Language Archive (ANLA). Though designed exclusively as a repository of linguistic knowledge, ANLA is now increasingly recognized by its user community as a rich source of ethnographic information. Language documentation is for the most part a holistic effort, and though language documenters may not be specialists in topics such as botany, kinship, or geography, they are often the only ones to record this knowledge. Hence the value of language archives as repositories of traditional knowledge. Of course, ANLA is also a rich source of more traditional linguistic documentation. This is not surprising in cases where little or no published documentation exists. However, increasingly we are discovering important information which was excluded from published reference works, ostensibly because it was not thought to be important at the time. Archival documents have revealed errors and oversights in the published records for even the most well-documented Alaskan languages. While anecdotal, these experiences demonstrate the value of preserving all linguistic data, even in cases where good published documentation exists. Digital language archives must resist pressure from the wider library and archives community to prioritize preservation efforts and triage collection. Fortunately, digital language archives are already ahead of the curve, having developed inter-institutional frameworks which stress regional focus and avoid duplication of preservation efforts (Barwick 2004, AIMS Working Group 2012). On this tenth anniversary of PARADISEC it is encouraging to note the great progress which has been made in the development of digital ethnographic archives; however, we must also be prepared for a new era in which digital archiving is a quotidian effort and we face increasing pressure to discard materials. References AIMS Working Group. 2012. AIMS Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship. Barwick, Linda. 2004. Turning It All Upside Down . . . Imagining a distributed digital audiovisual archive. Literary and Linguistic Computing 19.253-63. Bird, Steven and Gary Simons. 2003. Seven dimensions of portability for language documentation and description. Language 79(3).557-82. Ooghe, Bart, Heritage Cell Waasland and Dries Moreels. 2009. Analysing selection for digitisation. D-Lib Magazine 15(9/10).1082-987

Making Meaning of Historical Papua New Guinea Recordings

PARADISEC’s PNG collections represent the great diversity in the regions and languages of PNG. In 2016 and 2017, in recognition of the value of PARADISEC’s collections, ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) provided funding for us to concentrate efforts on enhancing the metadata that describes our Papua New Guinea (PNG) collections, an effort designed to maximise the findability and useability of the language and music recordings preserved in the archive for both source communities and researchers. PARADISEC's subsequent engagement with PNG language experts has led to collaborations with members of speaker communities who are part of the PNG diaspora in Australia. In this paper, we show that making historical recordings more findable, accessible and better described can result in meaningful interactions with and responses to the data in source communities. The effects of empowering speaker communities in their relationships to archives can be far reaching – even inverting, or disrupting the power relationships that have resulted from the colonial histories in which archives are embedded

OS ACERVOS E A DOCUMENTAÇÃO LINGUÍSTICA

This article is derived from a conference at the ABRALIN ao vivo, held online, in 2020. The goal is to discuss the benefits and challenges associated with archiving in language documentation considering our accumulated knowledge as scholars who are deeply involved in administering, contributing to, and drawing on language archives, with an emphasis on the indigenous languages of Latin America. We focus in particular on the relevance of language archiving in Brazil, and its significance for scholars, community members, and other stakeholders.Este artigo é oriundo de uma conferência na ABRALIN ao vivo, realizada online, em 2020. O objetivo é discutir os benefícios e desafios associados à documentação e criação de acervos linguísticos considerando nosso conhecimento acumulado como pesquisadores profundamente envolvidos na administração e manutenção de acervos de línguas, com ênfase nas línguas indígenas da América Latina. Focamos na relevância de acervos linguísticos no Brasil e sua importância para a comunidade acadêmica, membros de comunidades indígenas e outras partes interessadas